Fears over the size of South Australia’s growing debt are made worse by the fact the two most expensive items in the state budget are apparently the only things in Australia that are never going to cost any more.
After years of sustained inflation and a continuing surge in the cost of construction and building materials, we are led to believe the only two things that will never rise in cost are a thumping big children’s hospital and the never-ending upgrade of the longest road in suburban Adelaide.
There are people who have celebrated birthdays stuck in traffic on South Road as the $15.4bn upgrade plods along at glacial pace.
The cost of the new Women’s and Children’s Hospital has already blown out once, from $2.8bn to $3.2bn, but we are told will not do so again.
Yeah, right.
In this post-Covid world where borrowing became passe and money an abstract concept, the SA government is typical of many others living on the never-never to pay for key infrastructure.
Of course, in a political sense, the trump in the Labor government’s deck is that SA is not Victoria.
If you’re carrying on like a mad drunk, it is tactically handy to have George Best and Keith Moon as your next-door neighbours, for try as they might Peter Malinauskas and Stephen Mullighan are never going to look as out of control as their Victorian equivalents in setting world records for micturating money up against the wall.
To keep the analogy going, the SA government argues that a $50bn debt is small beer compared to the $196bn being clocked up over the border.
In their defence, SA has completely eschewed the anti-business tax agenda over the border, with no new taxes and none of the gouging seen in Victoria with huge hikes to land tax and unilateral levies to pay for the wreckage caused by a marathon lockdown.
Yet as convenient as it might be for SA Labor to point to Victoria, the truth remains that SA could and should be doing a much better job of reining in debt – especially given the surge in its tax take through stamp duty and other taxes as the Adelaide property market really hits its straps.
Students of SA politics will recall the $3.1bn figure as holding an infamous place in the state’s history. When the State Bank collapsed at the end of the Bannon era in 1991, it lumbered the state with a $3.1bn debt. That figure hovered like a black cloud over SA well into this century, in terms of economic performance, sense of identity and self-confidence.
This figure looks like loose change compared with the debt confirmed by the state government on Thursday.
When he won the 1993 election in the backdraft of the State Bank collapse and burdened with huge debt, SA Liberal premier Dean Brown tried to instil some false confidence in the joint by releasing a new number plate slogan. It read “SA: Going all the way”, and it was subsequently shelved on account of the double entendre.
As Malinauskas racks up a monstrous debt of his own, the number plate slogan he’s stumping for reads “SA: Better than Victoria”.
Punctuation is endangered. Full stop.
Intimidated by the semicolon, the ellipsis, the fullstop? The world of punctuation is ever more complicated and difficult to navigate.
Stop asking Jews to be ashamed of ourselves
Suddenly, the political is personal in a way no other national group is forced to endure.